Microsoft will be submitting its various "shared source" licenses to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in the hope of being granted 'official' open source status.
At the O'Reilly's Open Source Conference last week, the Redmond giant said it would be submitting its shared-source licenses to the OSI, which judges whether new licenses meet its criteria for listing.
Jon Rosenberg, Microsoft's director of source programs, described the move on the company's open-source blog, Port 25. "Today, we reached another milestone with the decision to submit our open licenses to the OSI approval process, which, if the licenses are approved, should give the community additional confidence that the code we're sharing is truly open source," he announced.
Microsoft has been steadily engaging more and more with the open-source realm, although coming nowhere near to abandoning its proprietary software philosophy. But earlier this year, chief executive Steve Ballmer accused Linux, OpenOffice.org and unspecified other open-source projects of violating 235 Microsoft patents and began soliciting open-source companies to come to a licensing agreement. The move arguably undid years of bridge-building.
Rosenberg indicated that the open-source style has been gradually becoming more accepted within Microsoft. The company's first source-code-sharing project, the Windows Installer XML package released in 2004, "required the approval of our group vice president and a herd of lawyers," he said, but now such projects are relatively commonplace.
Rosenberg said that OSI and Microsoft need to work together. "Although open source at Microsoft and the OSI are two different animals, I would submit to you that both are at a point in their maturity where their constituencies need to become more involved to maintain growth." And he hinted at Microsoft's possible ambitions, pointing to OSI discussions of becoming more like a traditional industry organisation with official participating members.
